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If you play killer guitar, it’s half the battle to becoming an espresso master. So it would seem.

Locally, two such individuals walked away with best espresso awards recently. By espresso, I mean that coffee magic, unadulterated by extra water, milk, soy milk or flavourings. It is coffee laid naked, wearing only a beret of perfect creamy crema. There is nothing to mask, smooth, firm, sweeten or dilute imperfections.

Espresso is starting to be taken seriously as the test of a true coffee lover. Instead of barista championships judging latte art, the focus is shifting to the quality of the quaff.

Last October, Vancouver’s Brian Turko, of Milano Coffee Lounge and Turk’s, Coffee Lounge took gold at an international competition at the godhead of espresso – Italy. His adoration of espresso began as an East Van musician who drank copious amounts of cappuccinos on Commercial Drive in the 1980s to save himself from booze and drugs, the ruin of many a musician friend. “I went clean and sober and stayed away from that. I was a bad boy,” he admits. “I began running up to Commercial Drive to meet people over a cappuccino in the Italian coffee bars. I wasn’t particularly welcome but I pioneered that cross-over. Friends would ask what I was doing saying they were old people’s hang outs.”

Turko recently wrote a song about coffee as an enchanting seductress. He’s planning to record with friend John Faye, drummer for the Tragically Hip. During an interview at Milano Coffee Lounge, which he operates with wife Linda, Turko, a pressure chamber of energy, strapped on an acoustic guitar, braced himself against bags of coffee beans and belted out the bluesy homage to coffee called Dolce La Miscela. He’s like a shot of espresso himself, he admits: “I’m short, fast and intense.” Check, check and CHECK.

Roasting and blending coffee, he says, is like music. It comes down to composition and balance.

At about the same time last fall, Gino Rutigliano, of Bowen Island Coffee Roasters and Cafe, a killer bass guitarist (want to see? http://bit.ly/WMyZ24) won third place at America’s Best Espresso competition for western North America.

“I was a professional musician for 17 years. My biggest claim to fame is playing with Frank Soda and cutting five records. But then I wanted to have a family and moved to Bowen Island,” he says, “I was always super-passionate about food. My mum always served espresso and as a kid, I remember she’d put a shot of espresso with sugar in my glass of milk.”

The day before the espresso competition in Seattle, he practised on the machines, pulling 30 shots and tasting them. “I was bouncing off the walls. I really was sleepless in Seattle.”

Rutigliano’s winning espresso blend is old-school with a small percentage of robusta beans added to high-quality arabica beans. In today’s coffee world (referred to as Third Wave), robusta is synonymous with cheap and cruddy but there are premium robustas which he uses. “It’s taboo in some people’s minds but Italians have been doing it for a hundred years,” he says. “At the competition, I went the Italian way. I’ve experimented with and without robusta and had success with both. If used in the right proportion, it’s fantastic. That’s my opinion. For me, it’s like seasoning, like salt on a steak. Anyone who’s done research knows if you use robusta as seasoning, it’s fantastic. It’s kinda like a touch of wine.”

Espresso is kinda like wine in another way – strong opinions on taste and methods abound when it comes to espresso.

Reg James, of Espressotec, an espresso equipment company, is a fierce defender of old-school blending with a small dose of robusta. “Of course, it’s a taste thing but to say robusta is a cost-saving device is a red herring. High quality robusta often costs more than similar arabica. Agreed, roasting can manipulate acidity a small amount, but robusta does it naturally with the benefit of adding crema and more caramelly and chocolate notes which is what I think most people prefer in their espresso when given the choice. But they never are. Local roasters have no robusta blends to offer. Most roasters design their espresso to ‘stand up’ in milk-based drinks because that’s where 90 to 95 per cent of the espresso ends up. When given a side by side comparison, three out of four people will choose an espresso with robusta in it,” says James. (James serves one at his shop in Richmond and one of Turko’s eight espresso blends does have some robusta.)

Mark Prince, (coffee geek supreme, world barista championship judge, coffee lecturer, and the man behind coffeegeek.com) has, of course, strong opinions. The robusta debate is over as far as he’s concerned. “In the end, the overwhelming consensus was no, robusta adds nothing beneficial to the cup, while adding too many detriments,” he says. New methods and demanding standards trumped the “romance and idealism of Italian espresso,” he feels. He ventures even further into a minefield: “I’d add that espresso, by the early 2000s, had really become better as a beverage in Scandinavia, North America and Australia/New Zealand as compared to Italy. We found that through absolutely strict controls and procedures, we could coax more sweetness and more substance out of the ground coffee than you could find in a typical Italian café espresso.” Whoaa! He’s vexing the gods, the founders of espresso!

Turko’s award-winning blend, La Futura, has 10 different arabica beans. All of the eight espresso blends on offer at any given time contain eight to 11 different varietals. “It took 1,500 combinations and around 20,000 tastings and five years to balance,” he says of La Futura. “Like they say in music, if you have what it takes, you’ll bring it out.”

At Milano Coffee Lounge (the Eighth Avenue and Powell Street locations), you can pick a ‘sampler’ of three espressos for $6. Their Commercial Drive store, Turk’s, will soon have a sampler, too.

Prince weighs in on blends with so many varietals. “Italian roasters take great pride in saying their espresso blends contain 10, 11 or more different coffees. But we’ve learned over time that this just homogenizes espresso, makes it difficult to distinguish specific flavours or origins. We’ve come to find that a simple two, three or maybe four-bean blend, where you take one coffee with a very identifiable taste component and another coffee or two with equally identifiable taste components and blend them, you can create a complex beverage where you can still identify things like blueberries or red apple, or sweet tobacco or caramel.”

It’s beginning to sound a lot like the oenophile world. New World versus Old World. French style versus California. Tastes and opinions butt against one another.

For the average consumer, it’s all good. As Grady Buhler, quality control leader for JJ Bean says: “It’s a little of the Old World versus New World style. I wouldn’t be quick to pass judgment on which is better. We’re firmly in the New World West Coast style. Our philosophy is, everything by taste. If we came across a really good robusta, we might be open to trying it,” he says. “Trends come and go. Ten years ago, dark roasts were favoured. Now, it’s a really light roast and roasters try to maximize inherent origin characteristics.”

If you are like me, you headed toward espresso starting with caffe lattes, moved on to cappuccinos and Americanos and got caught up by the Third Wave (artisanal coffees, fair trade, single origin, shade-grown, etc. etc.). But North Americans, unlike Italians, were not and still are not avid espresso fans. I like them occasionally but like most, I like my coffee to last longer than a couple of minutes, lingering over a conversation or at my desk.

Besides, says Turko, North American espresso evolved in a different way.

“North American espresso is not Italian espresso any more than a pair of vinyl shoes is leather shoes,” says Turko. “Espresso is 95 per cent acidity and 1.5 per cent water. Drip coffee is the reverse. The whole West Coast coffee taste came from dark roasts and Americanos.”

As better tasting espressos become available, we’re beginning to develop a hankering for straight-up espresso. At some of Turko’s coffee bars, about 20 per cent of coffee sales are for espresso. “It’s at the tipping point now,” says Turko.

During the interview, I sipped his award-winning espresso, La Futura. It was, in a word, gorgeous. Milano Coffee has eight different grinders suited to different blends and effects. Another espresso, to which he added some sugar (no sacrilege, he says), is, he says, like crème brûlé. It really was a creamy, smooth dessert.

Espresso, he says, should sit for 40 seconds after it is pulled to get all the flavours but finished within two minutes, before it starts to oxidize. “When air meets it, astringent properties come out,” he says. And the best time to drink it is in the morning before the tongue is “stressed” and coloured by other foods. And, he says, pass the last sip past the roof of your mouth and breath out.

Turko frequently invokes the name, Francesco Curatolo, the founder of Milano Coffee, who, as a friend, mentored him. A photograph of the two of them hangs prominently at the coffee bar on Eighth, where Turko still roasts in the back, like his mentor did. “He was a retired professor with a big IQ. He was a genius and a lot of people under-estimated him because of his broken English.”

Starbucks offered Curatolo “a lot of money” to buy him out, but he refused. He was committed to making espresso his way: the right way, says Turko, who eventually bought Milano and all the “intellectual property” in 2003 when Curatolo decided to move back to Italy. “I bought it because it is the real deal,” says Turko.

Under Curatolo’s tutelage, Turko opened his first coffee bar, Turk’s, on Commercial Drive, in 1997. He says before that, there was an “older coffee mafia,” he says. “Guys who tried got Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown through windows.”

In the roasting room at Milano’s, Turko’s working on a signature line called Divine Cup. “I believe it’s possible to make everybody happy whether their taste is rockabilly, ballads, classical or jazz.”

mstainsby vancouversun.com/miastainsby

Twitter.com/miastainsby

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